"He may be right, he may be wrong, but whichever it is sure isn't a function of the number of people who agree or disagree with him."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the *downside* of democracy - it assumes it is.
If course, pretty much every other political system out there is even worse, since it doesn't have any measurements for how right or wrong the leader is *at all*, not even a flawed one.
Re:Experimental set-up raises a few questions
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Ants That Can Count
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Actually - you raise an interesting point, though I think the other stilt-test discounts it, but I remember reading that insects have neuron clusters on each limb, which respond to stimulus and control them. This is part of how they are able to navigate such complex terrain - dedicated mini-brains on each leg controlling just that leg. One has to wonder if they made sure not to damage those nerve-clusters.
Don't be so sure... I think the dotcom bubble wasn't a bubble at all, it was just premature speculation, the net-economy is inevitable, what was wrong was thinking the world will change fast, but change it will. As it stands, I never go to the grocery story - I buy all my groceries online. In my case it's a great saving, I ride a motorbike and I don't have to buy a car to go get my monthlies, I can buy bulk and have it all on my doorstep on Saturday morning. No money spent on plastic bags, no money spent on petrol - and I can commute to work using cheap transport.
This particular online grocer is in fact a web-store for an existing large chain here, but their customer base is growing *fast* in due course, keeping more than a handful of the brick-and-mortars open must inevitably become uneconomic for them. Customers are switching because getting your groceries online is faster, easier, more convenient - and notably - cheaper.
...right somebody has been reading too much pop-science and not nearly enough of the real thing. You can't construct a species with *just* DNA, that idea was popular in the 60's real geneticists have long since learned better. For starters, there are prions - which have a significant impact on how DNA is actually USED to make proteins, (same DNA, different prions - very different [and probably dead] result). And that's not the half of it. Did you know that frog DNA is several orders of magnitude more complex than human DNA ?
Well it needs to be - frog eggs hatch in an uncontrolled environment so it's filled with little sequences that say things like "if temperature is between 0 and 5 C produces enzyme A, between 6 and 10C produce enzyme B" etc. (this is vastly oversimplified but you get the idea). Human DNA is developed inside a perfectly controlled environment (known as the womb) so it doesn't bother with such code, all the code in there can assume that the development will be happening at around 37C.
Or how about the fact that you have about five billion times as many connections between the neurons in your brain (the rest of us about 15:p ) as there are genes in the human genome ? In short, humans are a lot more complex than our DNA is.
Oh and how about this little gem. Inside the human genome is the complete DNA code for a very deadly virus. Split up into three disconnected sections (so it can't form the virus) - the virus itself is extinct but would have been quite the terrible plague in it's day - all mammals have it, we must have gotten it very shortly after we BECAME mammals, and it stuck because we stole a major trick from the virus. The virus knew how to hide itself from our immune systems - well, the DNA that encoded how it does that, is now used by fetuses to prevent the mother's immune system from killing them.
So... inside human DNA is DNA that isn't human, you *could* make a human being without having any of it (probably we don't know for sure that the other parts aren't used somewhere, but it's very unlikely) provided you had an alternate way of preventing the mother's immune system from attacking the fetus (or perhaps an artificial uterus).
In short, I'm with the GP: a DNA sequence, without any context will present (at best) a practical joke... come to think of it... if they managed to extract the virus bits and construct that (since, after all virusses are way simpler organisms and don't need all those prions and enzymes and mitochondria we do)... well, we may just end up unleashing a plague and wiping out the very aliens we were trying to contact (or at the very least, pissing them off and ensuring they arrange a visit from the galactic version of the CDC to come impose a permanent quarantine and pest-control)...
See another post of mine - something like this is already employed on some cars - it relies on measuring the axel rotations rather than the wheel, which is at least constant - but still puts you out by any variations in the size of the real wheel. If there is a way to measure velocity from inside the car, it's using something we've never thought off and the core problem is this: velocity is a relative measurement (at least - if you're not riding a lightbeam) - it's your velocity relative to something else we're measuring. Technically, we're all - right now, moving at about 12000km/24 hours, but because everything nearby is moving at the same speed in the same direction, it's invisible to us.
In the case of the car, it's the velocity relative to the road and surrounding environment we're interested in - and I suspect it's even theoretically impossible to measure that from INSIDE the moving vehicle (I haven't done the maths or worked out this kind of physics in about a decade though so I may be wrong, if so - I would love to be corrected).
Ironically, though GPS's are really inaccurate - this is because they weren't designed for the job, one that was, could probably be much MORE acurate -because it measures speed relative to a fixed point of reference (the satelites).
Well perhaps maths is less of a factor here than I was implying, though I was generalizing about a number of factors. It's still true though - maths is abstracted, and it's frequently invaluable not to forget that. As per my example of the earths circumference at the equator - that's a very rounded figure, and only accurate if you ignore that the earth is full of mountains, valleys, continents and oceans even just accounting for those would probably push the margin of error quite high, maybe at least 3 to 5 percent.
Okay, that one was a bit of an exageration/oversimplification.
What actually happens (this is with front-wheel drive cars, rear-wheel-drive and permanent 4x4 have different setups) is that the engin only pulls on both front wheels when you're going straight. As soon as you turn, it disengages the wheel on the side to which you are turning. So your rear wheels are just tagging along anyway, when you turn, so is one of the wheels on the left. If you turn sharply enough, you will indeed reverse them - but that takes a pretty extreme turn. They are only turning at all because of friction with the road - which is a force going the opposite way of the car;)
And before somebody get's all flamey about that, I KNOW energy never gets lost. Friction does however cause energy conversions and transfers which thermodynamics do not consider or keep track off, so for the purposes of the discussion it's "lost" (well more technically, it's over there on the other side where we're not looking).
Sheez... Pi is one example of maths and reality not quite matching - I gave a bloody paragraph full of others. I wasn't ATTACKING anything, I was making a general statement.
There are no perfect circles. The definition of a circle violates the rules of physics, as does a point, a line and a sphere, and triangle... these are abstractions, they were wonderfully USEFULL abstractions, but they are, nonetheless not real things.
A point has no size, a line has no with, a triangle has not depth (neither does a circle), a sphere is at least possible in dimensions - but physically impossible except perhaps at the exact center of the universe - everywhere else it WILL be distorted by gravity (in the center of the universe it will ALSO be under effect of gravity, but it may just be equal in all directions).
Very OFTEN the reason some things work in theory and not in practice, is because what we can do mathematically using models of impossible perfection cannot be replicated in reality. Are you happier with this version of the exact same sentence ?
Or are you one of those people who think that since thermodynamics predict that gas models that are perfect spheres and bounce without ever losing energy have increasing entropy, that all things in the universe must have increasing entropy ? Reality-check, thermodynamics is wonderful for predicting what gasses will do, provided you're not predicting anything that is actually affected by what it makes assumptions about (real gas molecules aren't spherical and they have this little thing called friction which leads to energy loss when they hit one another)... but the second rule of thermodynamics does not tell us what say... planets or monkeys will do.
Assuming the universe will end up with all matter smeared out evenly, because sooner or later that's the lowest energy state of gas in a container... that's taking an abstract model beyond it's usefulness and making predictions about reality that don't hold up (for starters... this classic interpretation is in direct contradiction to what the Einstein equations tell us the universe ought to do over time). I also loved "the last question", it's probably Asimov's single best work - but sorry, he got the science on that one dead (if you'll excuse the pun) wrong.
Same goes for Euclidean geometry if you forget that the shapes it deals with don't exist.
Actually, that's not always where it's measured, though it's a common one. I had a '99 Renault Megane where the speedometer just completely stopped working one day after an emergency handbrake turn (don't ask).
The renault (or at least, THAT renault) has a device on the front axels that looks like a wide gearwheel, it doesn't gear into anything though, it passes a small laser-beam and an optic-sensor, as the little gear wheel turns, it interrupts the beam and a small digital computer measures the "clicks" (yep, if this sounds remarkably like how a mouse wheel works, it's because it's virtually the same design). Of course, after spending a fortune to replace these... it turned out it wasn't where the fault lay. It took months to get sorted and lots of mechanic visits. Ultimately, it turned out during the emergency turn the battery had spilled acid, some of which had dropped on the circuitry that actually *counts* the clicks from optic-sensor, frying it.
Well, if you read a single sentence, without the context in which it was written and declare it absurd - that is a fallacy. Specifically - it's a strawman attack.
The statement by itself would be rather absurd, in the context of the post as a whole it was a sensible reality check, see my OTHER response where I clarify it even better.
Okay... I did cite a whole bunch of the main reasons why speedometers are inaccurate, and I agree, most of them are simply measurement difficulty.
What I was responding to with the only line you seem to have noticed was the parents claim that since we know how to calculate the circumference of a circle using Pi and the radius we can therefore calculate distance with perfect accuracy. Since we can't know the true value of Pi, we cannot calculate circumference from radius accurately, though it's true that we can do it more accurately than we can actually measure it (which mind you - applies to the radius as well).
My point, which you missed, is that mathematics is simple and logical and straightforward but the real world isn't, and the parent doesn't seem to grasp that while we can do maths with (near) perfect answers, there will always be a margin of error in the application of these results to the real world for a lot of reasons.
The main reason in this case is that Euclidean geometry is filled with a whole lot of assumptions in it's definitions, it's based in fact, on the maths as it would apply to a whole bunch of things that can never exist - like perfect spheres or circles, in fact the most fundamental Euclidian shape 'the point' - is physically impossible to create (at least out of matter) - all known matter have dimensions, and the very definition of a point is that it doesn't have any size in any of them...
Maths is an abstraction - that's what MAKES it useful - it allows us to make general rules about the universe that applies with a large degree of accuracy to a whole lot of different things (we can use the same sum to calculate the circumference of a tire or the Earth's equator) but when doing engineering, it's very important to remember that the abstraction is not the real world. Neither of the above is a perfect circle and this introduces inaccuracy. How much inaccuracy and how much compensation to do is determined by the application. 12741 km is not the EXACT circumference of the earth, but it's quite close enough for almost every purpose... sometimes though, you may need to know it in millimeters - then you need to do the same sum to a much more complex degree, and use much better measuring tools.
And that my friends, is why some things work in theory but not in practice.
Yep, and we have *such* and exact value for Pi. Not to mention the radios of wheels are a perfect constant because tire-tread never wears out, and nobody ever uses non-standard wheel-sizes. Also, wheels never skid even for a moment, when turning there isn't a moment where two wheels are actually going the opposite direction....
In short, accurate speed measurement is basically impossible from inside a car, there is a huge margin of error. In the interest of safety, car manufactures design their speedometers to overcompensate, so the margin is always above true speed. Reporting 5% under true speed would be much more dangerous than 5% over.
One can only get a truly accurate speed measurement using an external measuring device.
There's a major point hidden in there... we've seen for years politicians arguing that games cause violence and aggression.
Why aren't we seeing those same politicians complaining against sports ? Especially the particularly violent kinds like boxing, wrestling and ice-hockey ?
I mean, if watching a violent movie or playing a violent game is going to turn you into a killer... how is actually beating somebody unconscious better ? But I guess we haven't seen a lot of convicted killers trying to palm off the responsibility for their crimes on Don King, it's just easier to blame EA maybe ?
Our society actively encourages children, particularly boys, to engage in one form of aggressive, violent and competitive behavior against their peers, and if they think about it at all, believes it a harmless way to burn off rage with fairly little risk of real harm (odd, last I checked you got a lot more sports-field injuries than gaming, and RSI is a much less damaging injury than a broken knee). While another form of harmless acted-out aggression is deemed to somehow worsen those same hormonal and societal stresses ?
Isn't this perhaps the single best argument yet against censoring games ? If we are going to censor them for potentially leading to violence, we must surely ban anybody under 18 from doing wrestling or boxing (or watching matches on TV), and probably American Football, ice-hockey and in fact any other contact sport while we're at it... There is no argument about the one that doesn't apply to the other (sports are *more* immersive than games, you are actually DOING it, not just pretending) - so since the very procensorship crowd is the same people who lament that some of us just don't LIKE sports and never did - well it does sort of leave them without a leg to stand on.
Less than a dozen a year... that equates to less than one a month... sounds as close to dead as make no difference to me. None of the samples you showed could not have been done by bank-transfer or cash for probably less hassle.
>And just for the record, Shakespeare submitted his works in handwritten text written with a pen... That must have taken some doing... considering he owned his theater and lived before the invention of publishing houses... who did he "submit" it to, pray tell ? The trunk marked scripts behind the stage of the globe ? Nobody approved his works- he wrote, the actors rehearsed, the play was performed and hopefully the queen didn't behead anybody.
Wait... you still OWN a check-book... ? I mean, I knew American banks were behind the times but sheez...
I have a current account with full overdraft facility, it is everything your "check account" is, in fact considering I'm a gold-card customer - it's possibly quite a bit more - but it doesn't come with a check-book unless you specifically ask for one (which only old people do). It comes with a gold card, which happens to work everywhere a credit card does, but unlike a credit card talks directly to my current account, I can spend into overdraft if I need to (as with checks), I can draw cash at an ATM (which checks cannot do) - these days, all check accounts have to come with an accompanying ATM card anyway - banks here in my third-world home country (where they are notorious for lack of competition and high prices) - nevertheless figured out a long time ago that, that being the case- the check-book is now superfluous. Hardly any shops will accept them anymore because check-fraud is just way too easy - in short... of your examples for why I should concern myself with an outdated technology which as a left-dominant ambextrous person I never did master well (I started simply ignoring the teachers and writing block-letters about halfway through high-school, accepting the mark-downs - within a month they gave me permission to do it on the grounds that they couldn't keep failing an A-student or their own jobs were on the line)... writing is all but an archaic tech now - if cellphone keypads weren't so cumbersome, I wouldn't even own a pocket notebook anymore and that will change - soon... this is a good thing(tm) - if anything it will reduce the literacy barrier and allow more people to actually be able to read and write, even if they don't do it with pens.
>Historians a few hundred years from now will have slim pickings of our doings and history. Considering that our current doings and history seem to consist mostly of the goatse guy, lolcats and people denying science... this may not be a bad thing(tm) ?
I am an environmentalist, I want to preserve as much as possible of our natural resources, but most of the people who claim to be just annoy the hell out of me because they ignore science - and end up doing more harm to the environment than good !
Another example - I love the Kruger National Park here, one of the very oldest and still among the largest National Parks in the world (it was founded about the same time as the very oldest, but without the one knowing about the other). I have been going there once a year, every year for my entire life. I have seen it change... we don't live in a world anymore where Elephants have the entire continent to migrate across - and now we have 15000 of them in an area that can support about 3000. Why ? Because "environmentalists" have managed through political pressure to get culling banned... well the park is on the verge of an ecological collapse because the elephants are destroying everything and eating everything and within another decade the impact will be such that we'll see mass starvation deaths of all the herbivores, chaining into the carnivores - and yep, most of the Elephants will starve to death.
As it stands, we're probably too late already - the current rate of population growth among the Elephants is now higher than the highest rate at which they could possibly be culled - we can't even keep the population steady - let alone reduce it - and the park management and scientists are at a loss for a sollution... one of the last pieces of relatively unspoilt nature in Africa, the single largest source of tourism income on the continent (without which our entire economy will go down the tubes... so let's see - a lot of starving people as well) - because some people think Elephants are so cute you can't shoot one to save the species.
Not long ago - the park sold off a bunch of Rhino's to game farms since the population was getting out of hand (they can't do that with elephants however as it's virtually impossible) - this is the park that did the first successful migrations of Rhino and they know their stuff. Where were protests however from greens complaining about "rhinos being sold by a national park to get killed". Nobody thinks, those farmers aren't going to kill all the rhino, they are going to farm them. Sure some will be hunted, but at least we'll have other Rhinos around. If a viral plague wiped out the Kruger's population tomorrow - we'd have Rhino's in other area's we could reintroduce from (in fact the Rhino's in the park didn't come from there, they had been wiped out before the park's foundation by hunters, these had been migrated back in the 50's from the (then) Natal province).
Basically - we're watching what little natural heritage we have left being destroyed in Africa - not by industry (which is generally the problem elsewhere) - ours are being destroyed by the very environmentalists who ought to be protecting it !
Oh well rant-time over, I should do some work for my evil corporate masters:P
I can confirm this from personal experience. I live less than 3km from the Koeberg Nuclear Power plant in Cape Town. It went "down" last year, due to an operator error (some moron dropped a bolt into the reactor turbine and messed up the gearing) - despite harm (in this case from stupidity, but as bad as anything likely to come from malice) there was no nuclear threat, no danger to the public- just a couple of weeks with a lot of brown-outs as we had to rely on only one of the two reactors at Koeberg and ship in surplus from up north on lines that haven't been used in over two decades (and thus proved... unreliable due to under-maintenance)... all hell broke lose ? Yeah, restaurants were cooking on gas and serving by candlelight... oh wait, they do that anyway ! Seriously - it was a bit of a cold winter and gass-heater sales skyrocketed, big economic impact, but any power-station having an outage would have had the same effect, the fact that it was nuclear was no different. The only bit where you may say it played a part was that the repairs took a long time (after all, you need a lot of highly-trained people working very safely with difficult machinery to repair a nuclear turbine without endangering the workers).
Pebble-bed breeder reactors are safe, they don't blow up even if something does go wrong, they generate almost no pollution (the worst case was that they could raise sea-level temperatures if you use sea-water to cool them, like Koeberg does - but the sollution to that is easy, just leave the water standing for a few days to cool down before you pump it back - as I believe is done now). Despite the success of Koeberg, and the fact that without it - this metropolis I live in (the single most popular tourist destination on the entire continent) could not have existed as there is no other technology that could supply it's needs reliably enough all-year-round and no other readily available fuel source for fossil-fuel generators, when it was proposed to build two more near Durban - protests in the streets led to the project being postponed and possibly canned...
It's scary how people just don't think - it's as if, you choose a point-of-view and then go along with everyone else who claims the same point-of-view. If you care about the environment, you reject nuclear because greenpeace does - even though the reasons for their doing so haven't been true for a very long time. Right now, globally, nuclear is the only viable means of generating our energy needs with sufficient left-over to make things like electric cars actually useful (no point in cutting emissions at the car, if you are upping them at the generator to do it) - and actually cut emissions by a massive amount - maybe enough to actually slow down climate-change before it is too late... The very people who should be pushing nuclear the hardest (the environmental movement) as the answer with the lowest pollution, lowest all round environmental impact (it doesn't use coal mines, no tankers to cause oil-spills and kill penguins) - are the ones stopping us using it.
It's simple, wind, geothermal and solar are good systems - for some places and some jobs, and a needed part of a sollution, but none of them can provide enough energy, soon enough, to avert a disaster, nuclear can.
Slashdot Mirror
"He may be right, he may be wrong, but whichever it is sure isn't a function of the number of people who agree or disagree with him."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the *downside* of democracy - it assumes it is.
If course, pretty much every other political system out there is even worse, since it doesn't have any measurements for how right or wrong the leader is *at all*, not even a flawed one.
Actually - you raise an interesting point, though I think the other stilt-test discounts it, but I remember reading that insects have neuron clusters on each limb, which respond to stimulus and control them. This is part of how they are able to navigate such complex terrain - dedicated mini-brains on each leg controlling just that leg.
One has to wonder if they made sure not to damage those nerve-clusters.
"but grocery stores aren't going anywhere"
Don't be so sure... I think the dotcom bubble wasn't a bubble at all, it was just premature speculation, the net-economy is inevitable, what was wrong was thinking the world will change fast, but change it will.
As it stands, I never go to the grocery story - I buy all my groceries online. In my case it's a great saving, I ride a motorbike and I don't have to buy a car to go get my monthlies, I can buy bulk and have it all on my doorstep on Saturday morning. No money spent on plastic bags, no money spent on petrol - and I can commute to work using cheap transport.
This particular online grocer is in fact a web-store for an existing large chain here, but their customer base is growing *fast* in due course, keeping more than a handful of the brick-and-mortars open must inevitably become uneconomic for them. Customers are switching because getting your groceries online is faster, easier, more convenient - and notably - cheaper.
...right somebody has been reading too much pop-science and not nearly enough of the real thing.
You can't construct a species with *just* DNA, that idea was popular in the 60's real geneticists have long since learned better.
For starters, there are prions - which have a significant impact on how DNA is actually USED to make proteins, (same DNA, different prions - very different [and probably dead] result).
And that's not the half of it. Did you know that frog DNA is several orders of magnitude more complex than human DNA ?
Well it needs to be - frog eggs hatch in an uncontrolled environment so it's filled with little sequences that say things like "if temperature is between 0 and 5 C produces enzyme A, between 6 and 10C produce enzyme B" etc. (this is vastly oversimplified but you get the idea).
Human DNA is developed inside a perfectly controlled environment (known as the womb) so it doesn't bother with such code, all the code in there can assume that the development will be happening at around 37C.
Or how about the fact that you have about five billion times as many connections between the neurons in your brain (the rest of us about 15 :p ) as there are genes in the human genome ? In short, humans are a lot more complex than our DNA is.
Oh and how about this little gem. Inside the human genome is the complete DNA code for a very deadly virus. Split up into three disconnected sections (so it can't form the virus) - the virus itself is extinct but would have been quite the terrible plague in it's day - all mammals have it, we must have gotten it very shortly after we BECAME mammals, and it stuck because we stole a major trick from the virus. The virus knew how to hide itself from our immune systems - well, the DNA that encoded how it does that, is now used by fetuses to prevent the mother's immune system from killing them.
So... inside human DNA is DNA that isn't human, you *could* make a human being without having any of it (probably we don't know for sure that the other parts aren't used somewhere, but it's very unlikely) provided you had an alternate way of preventing the mother's immune system from attacking the fetus (or perhaps an artificial uterus).
In short, I'm with the GP: a DNA sequence, without any context will present (at best) a practical joke... come to think of it... if they managed to extract the virus bits and construct that (since, after all virusses are way simpler organisms and don't need all those prions and enzymes and mitochondria we do)... well, we may just end up unleashing a plague and wiping out the very aliens we were trying to contact (or at the very least, pissing them off and ensuring they arrange a visit from the galactic version of the CDC to come impose a permanent quarantine and pest-control)...
See another post of mine - something like this is already employed on some cars - it relies on measuring the axel rotations rather than the wheel, which is at least constant - but still puts you out by any variations in the size of the real wheel. If there is a way to measure velocity from inside the car, it's using something we've never thought off and the core problem is this: velocity is a relative measurement (at least - if you're not riding a lightbeam) - it's your velocity relative to something else we're measuring. Technically, we're all - right now, moving at about 12000km/24 hours, but because everything nearby is moving at the same speed in the same direction, it's invisible to us.
In the case of the car, it's the velocity relative to the road and surrounding environment we're interested in - and I suspect it's even theoretically impossible to measure that from INSIDE the moving vehicle (I haven't done the maths or worked out this kind of physics in about a decade though so I may be wrong, if so - I would love to be corrected).
Ironically, though GPS's are really inaccurate - this is because they weren't designed for the job, one that was, could probably be much MORE acurate -because it measures speed relative to a fixed point of reference (the satelites).
Well perhaps maths is less of a factor here than I was implying, though I was generalizing about a number of factors. It's still true though - maths is abstracted, and it's frequently invaluable not to forget that. As per my example of the earths circumference at the equator - that's a very rounded figure, and only accurate if you ignore that the earth is full of mountains, valleys, continents and oceans even just accounting for those would probably push the margin of error quite high, maybe at least 3 to 5 percent.
Okay, that one was a bit of an exageration/oversimplification.
What actually happens (this is with front-wheel drive cars, rear-wheel-drive and permanent 4x4 have different setups) is that the engin only pulls on both front wheels when you're going straight. As soon as you turn, it disengages the wheel on the side to which you are turning. So your rear wheels are just tagging along anyway, when you turn, so is one of the wheels on the left. If you turn sharply enough, you will indeed reverse them - but that takes a pretty extreme turn. They are only turning at all because of friction with the road - which is a force going the opposite way of the car ;)
I'd rather look up yo momma's skirt... it's cheap and much more educational.
pwned.
And before somebody get's all flamey about that, I KNOW energy never gets lost. Friction does however cause energy conversions and transfers which thermodynamics do not consider or keep track off, so for the purposes of the discussion it's "lost" (well more technically, it's over there on the other side where we're not looking).
Did I say that ? Get over the strawman dude...
Sheez... Pi is one example of maths and reality not quite matching - I gave a bloody paragraph full of others. I wasn't ATTACKING anything, I was making a general statement.
There are no perfect circles. The definition of a circle violates the rules of physics, as does a point, a line and a sphere, and triangle... these are abstractions, they were wonderfully USEFULL abstractions, but they are, nonetheless not real things.
A point has no size, a line has no with, a triangle has not depth (neither does a circle), a sphere is at least possible in dimensions - but physically impossible except perhaps at the exact center of the universe - everywhere else it WILL be distorted by gravity (in the center of the universe it will ALSO be under effect of gravity, but it may just be equal in all directions).
Very OFTEN the reason some things work in theory and not in practice, is because what we can do mathematically using models of impossible perfection cannot be replicated in reality. Are you happier with this version of the exact same sentence ?
Or are you one of those people who think that since thermodynamics predict that gas models that are perfect spheres and bounce without ever losing energy have increasing entropy, that all things in the universe must have increasing entropy ?
Reality-check, thermodynamics is wonderful for predicting what gasses will do, provided you're not predicting anything that is actually affected by what it makes assumptions about (real gas molecules aren't spherical and they have this little thing called friction which leads to energy loss when they hit one another)... but the second rule of thermodynamics does not tell us what say... planets or monkeys will do.
Assuming the universe will end up with all matter smeared out evenly, because sooner or later that's the lowest energy state of gas in a container... that's taking an abstract model beyond it's usefulness and making predictions about reality that don't hold up (for starters... this classic interpretation is in direct contradiction to what the Einstein equations tell us the universe ought to do over time). I also loved "the last question", it's probably Asimov's single best work - but sorry, he got the science on that one dead (if you'll excuse the pun) wrong.
Same goes for Euclidean geometry if you forget that the shapes it deals with don't exist.
Actually, that's not always where it's measured, though it's a common one. I had a '99 Renault Megane where the speedometer just completely stopped working one day after an emergency handbrake turn (don't ask).
The renault (or at least, THAT renault) has a device on the front axels that looks like a wide gearwheel, it doesn't gear into anything though, it passes a small laser-beam and an optic-sensor, as the little gear wheel turns, it interrupts the beam and a small digital computer measures the "clicks" (yep, if this sounds remarkably like how a mouse wheel works, it's because it's virtually the same design).
Of course, after spending a fortune to replace these... it turned out it wasn't where the fault lay. It took months to get sorted and lots of mechanic visits. Ultimately, it turned out during the emergency turn the battery had spilled acid, some of which had dropped on the circuitry that actually *counts* the clicks from optic-sensor, frying it.
Well, if you read a single sentence, without the context in which it was written and declare it absurd - that is a fallacy.
Specifically - it's a strawman attack.
The statement by itself would be rather absurd, in the context of the post as a whole it was a sensible reality check, see my OTHER response where I clarify it even better.
Christ, you would think ANYBODY would have read more than the first damn LINE I wrote....
Okay... I did cite a whole bunch of the main reasons why speedometers are inaccurate, and I agree, most of them are simply measurement difficulty.
What I was responding to with the only line you seem to have noticed was the parents claim that since we know how to calculate the circumference of a circle using Pi and the radius we can therefore calculate distance with perfect accuracy.
Since we can't know the true value of Pi, we cannot calculate circumference from radius accurately, though it's true that we can do it more accurately than we can actually measure it (which mind you - applies to the radius as well).
My point, which you missed, is that mathematics is simple and logical and straightforward but the real world isn't, and the parent doesn't seem to grasp that while we can do maths with (near) perfect answers, there will always be a margin of error in the application of these results to the real world for a lot of reasons.
The main reason in this case is that Euclidean geometry is filled with a whole lot of assumptions in it's definitions, it's based in fact, on the maths as it would apply to a whole bunch of things that can never exist - like perfect spheres or circles, in fact the most fundamental Euclidian shape 'the point' - is physically impossible to create (at least out of matter) - all known matter have dimensions, and the very definition of a point is that it doesn't have any size in any of them...
Maths is an abstraction - that's what MAKES it useful - it allows us to make general rules about the universe that applies with a large degree of accuracy to a whole lot of different things (we can use the same sum to calculate the circumference of a tire or the Earth's equator) but when doing engineering, it's very important to remember that the abstraction is not the real world. Neither of the above is a perfect circle and this introduces inaccuracy. How much inaccuracy and how much compensation to do is determined by the application. 12741 km is not the EXACT circumference of the earth, but it's quite close enough for almost every purpose... sometimes though, you may need to know it in millimeters - then you need to do the same sum to a much more complex degree, and use much better measuring tools.
And that my friends, is why some things work in theory but not in practice.
Yep, and we have *such* and exact value for Pi.
Not to mention the radios of wheels are a perfect constant because tire-tread never wears out, and nobody ever uses non-standard wheel-sizes. Also, wheels never skid even for a moment, when turning there isn't a moment where two wheels are actually going the opposite direction....
In short, accurate speed measurement is basically impossible from inside a car, there is a huge margin of error. In the interest of safety, car manufactures design their speedometers to overcompensate, so the margin is always above true speed. Reporting 5% under true speed would be much more dangerous than 5% over.
One can only get a truly accurate speed measurement using an external measuring device.
Not to mention that strange burning sensation when you pee...
This is going to put a whole new twist in magic smoke theory....
Grateful Dead albums !
There's a major point hidden in there... we've seen for years politicians arguing that games cause violence and aggression.
Why aren't we seeing those same politicians complaining against sports ? Especially the particularly violent kinds like boxing, wrestling and ice-hockey ?
I mean, if watching a violent movie or playing a violent game is going to turn you into a killer... how is actually beating somebody unconscious better ?
But I guess we haven't seen a lot of convicted killers trying to palm off the responsibility for their crimes on Don King, it's just easier to blame EA maybe ?
Our society actively encourages children, particularly boys, to engage in one form of aggressive, violent and competitive behavior against their peers, and if they think about it at all, believes it a harmless way to burn off rage with fairly little risk of real harm (odd, last I checked you got a lot more sports-field injuries than gaming, and RSI is a much less damaging injury than a broken knee). While another form of harmless acted-out aggression is deemed to somehow worsen those same hormonal and societal stresses ?
Isn't this perhaps the single best argument yet against censoring games ? If we are going to censor them for potentially leading to violence, we must surely ban anybody under 18 from doing wrestling or boxing (or watching matches on TV), and probably American Football, ice-hockey and in fact
any other contact sport while we're at it...
There is no argument about the one that doesn't apply to the other (sports are *more* immersive than games, you are actually DOING it, not just pretending) - so since the very procensorship crowd is the same people who lament that some of us just don't LIKE sports and never did - well it does sort of leave them without a leg to stand on.
Less than a dozen a year... that equates to less than one a month... sounds as close to dead as make no difference to me.
None of the samples you showed could not have been done by bank-transfer or cash for probably less hassle.
>And just for the record, Shakespeare submitted his works in handwritten text written with a pen...
That must have taken some doing... considering he owned his theater and lived before the invention of publishing houses... who did he "submit" it to, pray tell ? The trunk marked scripts behind the stage of the globe ? Nobody approved his works- he wrote, the actors rehearsed, the play was performed and hopefully the queen didn't behead anybody.
Wait ... you still OWN a check-book... ?
I mean, I knew American banks were behind the times but sheez...
I have a current account with full overdraft facility, it is everything your "check account" is, in fact considering I'm a gold-card customer - it's possibly quite a bit more - but it doesn't come with a check-book unless you specifically ask for one (which only old people do).
It comes with a gold card, which happens to work everywhere a credit card does, but unlike a credit card talks directly to my current account, I can spend into overdraft if I need to (as with checks), I can draw cash at an ATM (which checks cannot do) - these days, all check accounts have to come with an accompanying ATM card anyway - banks here in my third-world home country (where they are notorious for lack of competition and high prices) - nevertheless figured out a long time ago that, that being the case- the check-book is now superfluous.
Hardly any shops will accept them anymore because check-fraud is just way too easy - in short... of your examples for why I should concern myself with an outdated technology which as a left-dominant ambextrous person I never did master well (I started simply ignoring the teachers and writing block-letters about halfway through high-school, accepting the mark-downs - within a month they gave me permission to do it on the grounds that they couldn't keep failing an A-student or their own jobs were on the line)... writing is all but an archaic tech now - if cellphone keypads weren't so cumbersome, I wouldn't even own a pocket notebook anymore and that will change - soon... this is a good thing(tm) - if anything it will reduce the literacy barrier and allow more people to actually be able to read and write, even if they don't do it with pens.
>Historians a few hundred years from now will have slim pickings of our doings and history.
Considering that our current doings and history seem to consist mostly of the goatse guy, lolcats and people denying science... this may not be a bad thing(tm) ?
I am an environmentalist, I want to preserve as much as possible of our natural resources, but most of the people who claim to be just annoy the hell out of me because they ignore science - and end up doing more harm to the environment than good !
Another example - I love the Kruger National Park here, one of the very oldest and still among the largest National Parks in the world (it was founded about the same time as the very oldest, but without the one knowing about the other). I have been going there once a year, every year for my entire life.
I have seen it change... we don't live in a world anymore where Elephants have the entire continent to migrate across - and now we have 15000 of them in an area that can support about 3000. Why ?
Because "environmentalists" have managed through political pressure to get culling banned... well the park is on the verge of an ecological collapse because the elephants are destroying everything and eating everything and within another decade the impact will be such that we'll see mass starvation deaths of all the herbivores, chaining into the carnivores - and yep, most of the Elephants will starve to death.
As it stands, we're probably too late already - the current rate of population growth among the Elephants is now higher than the highest rate at which they could possibly be culled - we can't even keep the population steady - let alone reduce it - and the park management and scientists are at a loss for a sollution... one of the last pieces of relatively unspoilt nature in Africa, the single largest source of tourism income on the continent (without which our entire economy will go down the tubes... so let's see - a lot of starving people as well) - because some people think Elephants are so cute you can't shoot one to save the species.
Not long ago - the park sold off a bunch of Rhino's to game farms since the population was getting out of hand (they can't do that with elephants however as it's virtually impossible) - this is the park that did the first successful migrations of Rhino and they know their stuff. Where were protests however from greens complaining about "rhinos being sold by a national park to get killed". Nobody thinks, those farmers aren't going to kill all the rhino, they are going to farm them. Sure some will be hunted, but at least we'll have other Rhinos around. If a viral plague wiped out the Kruger's population tomorrow - we'd have Rhino's in other area's we could reintroduce from (in fact the Rhino's in the park didn't come from there, they had been wiped out before the park's foundation by hunters, these had been migrated back in the 50's from the (then) Natal province).
Basically - we're watching what little natural heritage we have left being destroyed in Africa - not by industry (which is generally the problem elsewhere) - ours are being destroyed by the very environmentalists who ought to be protecting it !
Oh well rant-time over, I should do some work for my evil corporate masters :P
I can confirm this from personal experience. I live less than 3km from the Koeberg Nuclear Power plant in Cape Town. It went "down" last year, due to an operator error (some moron dropped a bolt into the reactor turbine and messed up the gearing) - despite harm (in this case from stupidity, but as bad as anything likely to come from malice) there was no nuclear threat, no danger to the public- just a couple of weeks with a lot of brown-outs as we had to rely on only one of the two reactors at Koeberg and ship in surplus from up north on lines that haven't been used in over two decades (and thus proved... unreliable due to under-maintenance)... all hell broke lose ? Yeah, restaurants were cooking on gas and serving by candlelight... oh wait, they do that anyway !
Seriously - it was a bit of a cold winter and gass-heater sales skyrocketed, big economic impact, but any power-station having an outage would have had the same effect, the fact that it was nuclear was no different. The only bit where you may say it played a part was that the repairs took a long time (after all, you need a lot of highly-trained people working very safely with difficult machinery to repair a nuclear turbine without endangering the workers).
Pebble-bed breeder reactors are safe, they don't blow up even if something does go wrong, they generate almost no pollution (the worst case was that they could raise sea-level temperatures if you use sea-water to cool them, like Koeberg does - but the sollution to that is easy, just leave the water standing for a few days to cool down before you pump it back - as I believe is done now).
Despite the success of Koeberg, and the fact that without it - this metropolis I live in (the single most popular tourist destination on the entire continent) could not have existed as there is no other technology that could supply it's needs reliably enough all-year-round and no other readily available fuel source for fossil-fuel generators, when it was proposed to build two more near Durban - protests in the streets led to the project being postponed and possibly canned...
It's scary how people just don't think - it's as if, you choose a point-of-view and then go along with everyone else who claims the same point-of-view. If you care about the environment, you reject nuclear because greenpeace does - even though the reasons for their doing so haven't been true for a very long time. Right now, globally, nuclear is the only viable means of generating our energy needs with sufficient left-over to make things like electric cars actually useful (no point in cutting emissions at the car, if you are upping them at the generator to do it) - and actually cut emissions by a massive amount - maybe enough to actually slow down climate-change before it is too late...
The very people who should be pushing nuclear the hardest (the environmental movement) as the answer with the lowest pollution, lowest all round environmental impact (it doesn't use coal mines, no tankers to cause oil-spills and kill penguins) - are the ones stopping us using it.
It's simple, wind, geothermal and solar are good systems - for some places and some jobs, and a needed part of a sollution, but none of them can provide enough energy, soon enough, to avert a disaster, nuclear can.